How did horoscopes start?

Buster Buchko: The earliest astrological text is called the Enuma Anu Enlil and it dates back to 1600 BCE. Despite this, astrology is believed to have begun 400 years earlier. Still, it's not inconceivable to have begun before that.Back in ancient times people weren't distracted by televisions, video games and deadlines. Instead of moving from one box (house, work, wherever) to another, as quickly as possible using a third box (a car) to get there,people spent more time outside and had more time to contemplate the natural world around them. Since light pollution was essentially non-existent, the magnificent night sky was irresistable to contemplate.These days, many of us don't even know what the moon phase is on any given day. In ancient days, everyone knew. Because they had so much more time for these things, people who were more detail oriented began to notice correlations between celestial events (like the moon phase) and personal events - most particularly political e! vents. Astrology became significantly more refined and personalized in ancient Greece.The "sun-sign" phenomena and daily horoscopes we're all familiar with began in the 1930's by an astrologer named R.H. Naylor. He had written an astrology article for a British paper called the Sunday Express about the newborn princess, which generated intense astrological interest from the papers readers. Wanting to capitalize on that interest, the paper encouraged Naylor to give their readers what they wanted. Thus was born the sun-sign craze. Naylor would've done equally well with rising signs instead, but knowing your rising sign is not as easy as your sun sign, making sun signs the best choice to single out for a general audience.If you want to know how to cast your own birth chart, you need a few books, including an ephemeris and an atlas....Show more

Nikki Sypult: Astrology began because human beings needed to mark the passage of time. We needed to know when it was going to get! cold, when it was going to get hot, etc. And we needed to kno! w ahead of time, so we could prepare for it.Humans figured out how to "tell time" by watching the way the planets, sun and moon moved against the background of the stars in the sky. Whenever the Sun was in "libra" for example, it started to get cold. Whenever the Sun was in "Aries" it started to warm up again. And we used the moon phases to mark the days of the month (that's why its called a "month"), and thereby to come up with 12 months / sections of the sky / "zodiac signs"The idea of being able to predict the future was perhaps an extension of the idea that the movement of the stars did predict the seasons accurately and reliably.That would be a sort of anthropological explanation of it, I suppose.A more spiritual explanation is that the being(s) who put the universe together did it in such a way that its inhabitants could get helpful information by observing it carefully, and they therefore developed the science of astrology - which would allow humans to understand how! the universe was delivering their destiny / karma by observing the movements of the stars - and they handed this science down through the universal generations since time immemorial.This is a sort of "Vedic" or "Hindu" explanation of the origin of astrology.Personally I guess I sort of hold both of them simultaneously and don't really see them in a contradictory way.PS - There is a much earlier astrological text called Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra which could date to 3,000 BCE roughly. India has a few very ancient astrological texts. Astrology is referenced in the Rg Veda which is scholastically accepted as an extremely ancient book from thousands of years BCE. India has dozens of books from the mideval period....Show more

Mitchell Pickens: Astrology is almost certainly the oldest and today among the most frequently encountered of all pseudosciences. Its conceptual origins can be traced back to the first half of the Hammurabi dynasty in Babylonia about 3,500 years a! go, yet most daily papers today have an astrology column.In its “mode! rn” form, astrology still asserts that the positions of the sun, moon, and the five planets known in antiquity (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) at the time an individual is born are somehow correlated with his or her personality, activities, preferences, and even major life events (accidents, marriages, divorces, etc.). Want to know the best day to ask for a raise, go to the dentist, get your hair done, or take a laxative? Consult your horoscope! There is no general agreement among astrologers as to how or why this can be. Nor is there agreement as to precisely which planetary positions lead to which specific individual traits or experiences. In fact, it is almost certain that no two astrologers will “cast” an individual's horoscope with the same result. The predictions are often so vague that verification is impossible. For instance, just when (and what?) is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Much more at link....Show more

Darrel Stele: back in the ! day people relied on psudoscience to answer the unknown. Gyspy culture relied on the stars to predict one's destiny/